Roses
by Little Obsessions
Summary: "You have roses, in your wedding bouquet, at your mother's insistence."


**Author's note:** The urge to write has been elusive of late, so I have no idea where this came from. I'm sorry for the fluffiness of it all.

 **Thanks:** to Mia Cooper, who always encourages me and backs me up and is a wonderful sounding board. She's a good woman. And a wonderful beta.

 **Disclaimer:** These characters don't belong to me, and nor does any reference or allusion to plots or idea that are recognisably Paramount's or CBS'. I make no gain – monetary or otherwise - from writing these stories.

* * *

 **"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."** \- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

* * *

You have roses, in your wedding bouquet, at your mother's insistence.

Or so you tell me. I smile, and you smile because you know I have you figured.

They are creamy, the thick petals heavy and vital, dropping into greens taken from the garden in Indiana where I've seen you become someone else entirely. At first it disconcerted me; your hair – growing and coming loose of the ties at the nape of your neck – falling over your face as you worked at the edge of an empty bed, soil lacing your nails and dulling pale hands and staining the knees of old jeans.

It reminded me of another world.

You laughed when I said I had expected you to be in uniform, and you rubbed your hands along the thighs of them, where the noise was louder than it should have been.

You looked up, eyes dancing in the sun, and said my name. It sounded like velvet folding, slowly and heavily, into itself.

It had been so long.

And I was lost.

"Indiana," you said, "is good for my soul."

I wondered, then, what your soul looked like. Once, long ago, stars ago, I thought I knew. And then everything that rent us apart took shape – black, vast, consuming – and I was reminded that roses have thorns.

When I cradled you in my arms, your body cooling and limp as life flowed from you, I could have sworn that I saw it seep from you, from between your pressed lips.

And it danced in front of me, teasing, flittering into nothing.

I had sobbed into your skin, your neck, begging you to stay.

And then by some miracle, the power of a deity even I cannot conceive of, you came back. You came back to me.

But it doesn't mean you didn't leave, time and again.

As you curl towards me, pale skin warming and glistening with sweat and moonlight, I can think only of how lost we were to each other at times. And the mistakes.

There were so many.

But this is not one of them. I know that.

"What are you thinking?" you ask, voice low and breathy, as it always is before sleep claims you.

You sleep, now, much more than you ever did.

"Nothing," I say. "Apart from how perfectly right this is."

You tilt your head up towards me, and I kiss your forehead. You don't shirk away, and that seems as miraculous as anything.

"Do you remember when you asked me if-"

"If you'd marry me?" I interrupt, and you huff out a little laugh and your face is bright and young.

You don't like me telling you that you are beautiful, but I want to say it anyway. It dances on the tip of my tongue, desperate to come out. You pre-empt it. You've always said my face gives me away, is my worst tell.

You raise a fine, sceptical brow.

"You're beautiful," I say before you can interrupt.

"You're deranged."

I think, once, I was. Sometimes, still, I think I am.

Time was hard on us, I think, as you stretch out. We are older, and much older than really we should be. Time became distorted and warped, stretching us beyond limits, stretching us to limits we didn't know we could reach. I turn onto my side, look at your wedding dress discarded in a pile of cream on the plush rug, reach over to grasp the delicate champagne flute that we poured and discarded just as quickly.

Your wedding dress.

Your hand trails over the skin of my back, curving over my backside and round my hip. Your lips alight on my shoulder and then you set your chin in the crook of my neck and, taking the glass from me, you drink too.

"I still don't like it," you say, pointing at the crumpled silk, and I laugh.

"You looked beautiful."

"That's what my mother said. She also got very upset when I told her I wouldn't be wearing white."

I think of the first time I saw you in a dress – red, cotton. I'd be lying to say I had been oblivious to your body, but for the first time it was a focus. I've never been like that as a man – not a voyeur, not a letch – and you were never my type. You seemed, in that black and scarlet uniform which clung to you like a second skin, - despite your size – to fill it to the brim. It made you bigger, more intimidating. I'd watched you bend over the con admired you in a detached way, but it was more your personality, your fire, which caught me off guard. It made me look closer, wonder what was under that tiny uniform.

Then we were stranded. The uniform disappeared, the dresses I didn't know you owned came out. Pyjamas. Vest tops and shorts when the days were warm. There was something so humanising, seeing you like that.

Then I saw you as a woman. Not as a woman captain, a deep ringing laugh, a pool shark, I saw you as the woman who had been – who was - Mark's fiancee. Someone's daughter. A woman who liked to sleep. A woman who made bathing a skill.

Is it silly it was then that I fell in love?

"I had to give in," you say into the silence, oblivious still to what I'm thinking. "But at this age, asking me to wear white…"

You squeeze my ass irreverently, making your point.

I laugh again, and turn, reaching out my arm to pull you to lie on my chest. Your chin rests there for a moment, then you look up.

"If you want to be sentimental," you trail your thin, pale fingers along the shape of the tattoo on my brow, "then tonight's the night. Tomorrow, you get your Admiral back."

I grin at you, rake my fingers through your longer hair. You started growing it when we returned, just after our first night together.

"Actually, Admiral," I correct, tugging gently on a curled lock which I took from a multitude of pins earlier, scattered across the dresser now, and let tumble down. There's something inherently intimate in the fact that I am the man who gets to do that. "Thirteen days. This is our honeymoon. I plan to regale you with all the reasons I love you…"

You laugh, deep, coming from somewhere I thought I'd never hear again. Somewhere I thought you, and I, had lost. You nip my chest lightly with your teeth, kiss the skin there.

"I might leave you," you climb off of me, pushing the covers back, then slide off the high bed.

I watch you, pale in the moonlight and gentle, indistinct glow which breaches the windows from Venice below. There's something obscene about the normalcy of this; of me, lying here, watching you like this.

There's something holy in it.

"Hungry?" You toss a strawberry up, taken from the unnecessarily large basket which was left as a gift, catch it between your teeth.

"Not for fruit," I growl, pushing the covers back.

"Now that's more like it, Commander…" you laugh, the misnomer an affectation now, rather than a true rank.

You bend over, run your fingers around the softening petals of the roses in the arrangement in the centre of the table.

"Did you organise these?"

You turn to me and come back to the bed, pulling on your satin robe as you go. I reach out my hand and beckon to you, watching as you tie it in a knot loosely around your waist. You pour some champagne into the glass on the bedside, laugh as I tug the recently tied knot open again.

"Yes," I lean over, pull you towards me.

"Futile," you whisper, letting me tug it from your arms and pool on the floor.

"Dressing?"

"No," you say dryly. "Resistance."

I feign a shudder and sit up, pulling you to stand in the space between my legs. You toss your head back and laugh again.

"Oh right, you've heard that in the bedroom before."

I reach forward, nip the soft flesh of your abdomen in my teeth.

"We never got that far Kathryn," I say, pulling you so you're off your feet and have to fall onto my chest.

You don't answer, instead you reach forward and kiss me.

Soft, like roses.

I gave you a rose once, I think, to try and show you. To try and put into a humble flower all the terrors I had when I held you to me, and you breathed a final breath. To animate those petals to illustrate the love that was blooming, frightened and more afraid as the days passed.

There are no words, I realise, and no gestures either.

But today, you had roses in your bouquet. Sometimes, you speak without opening your mouth. I realise I've always had you figured.


End file.
